The development of sharp, nanoscale tips and instruments to control use of such tips has led to important advances in imaging and fabricating materials at the microscale and nanoscale. Examples include various scanning probe microscopies including atomic force microscopy. In one important technology, for example, material can be coated onto a sharp tip, such as scanning probe or atomic force microscope tip, and then transported from the tip to a surface at fine resolution. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,827,979 to Mirkin et al. The tip can be disposed on a cantilever, and the cantilever can be individually actuated. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,642,129 to Liu et al. Multiple cantilevers can be used at once and, in some cases, individual cantilevers can be separately actuated.
Despite these advances, a need exists to improve such imaging and fabrication devices and processes, particularly when the numbers of these cantilevers and tips increase for a given fabrication process in higher density designs.